The Circle of Trek

First, the news: An animated Star Trek series is coming to Nickelodeon. Cool!

And now, a long, seemingly pointless story. The dots will be connected by the end. Promise.

A couple of days ago, I stumbled across this MeTV list of forgotten, mostly short-lived 1970s sci fi shows. To me, it was like unearthing buried treasure. That’s my TV generation, and I do dearly love me some cheesy sci fi. In this glorious age of YouTube, most of this stuff is readily available, so I randomly picked one to watch: a live-action Saturday-morning kids’ show from Filmation called Ark II. It's about some young scientists and a talking chimp (no, really), all of whom have biblical names (even the chimp), driving a futuristic RV called -- surprise! -- Ark II around a post-apocalyptic Paramount Ranch…ummm, I mean, Earth…to bring salvation…ummm, I mean, science…to a humanity that has reverted to primitive, ignorant lawlessness. It was reeeeally something. Like much of the TV of its day, it's a bizarre combination of entertaining ideas, social commentary, cheesy writing, bad acting, cheap production values, and some choices that do not hold up well after 40 years (like guest star Jonathan Harris (aka Dr. Smith) doing a dreadful Irish accent as the adult leader of a group of vagrant boys, many black, who call him...I kid you not...Master Fagin).

So anyway, my friend Chris (god bless Chris, he’s into pop-culture nostalgia even more than I am) comments that he thinks the futuristic RV was made for the George Peppard sci fi movie Damnation Alley, to which I respond, "Apparently not," because by then I’d watched the behind-the-scenes Ark II documentary made for the DVD release (NB: I have no life), where I learned that they actually built the vehicle for this series (and that it kept falling apart and was nearly undrivable).

So then – stay with me – my friend Cory pipes in with, “Wasn't there an RV-themed SF movie with John Saxon and Lurch? Was it Planet Earth with the Dinks?”

Now THIS is where it really starts to get interesting, because all kinds of bells go off in my head.

Cory is correct. Not only that: Planet Earth was a Gene Roddenberry TV movie/series pilot, a reworking of an earlier pilot he did, Genesis II. Both were set on post-apocalyptic Earth and dealt with the decline and rebirth of civilization. This is how Wikipedia describes Genesis II: “The film, which opens with the line, ‘My name is Dylan Hunt. My story begins the day on which I died,’ is the story of a 20th-century man thrown forward in time to a post-apocalyptic future, by an accident in suspended animation.” And Planet Earth "was the second attempt by Roddenberry to create a weekly series set on a post-apocalyptic future Earth. The previous pilot was Genesis II, and it featured many of the concepts and characters later redeveloped and mostly recast in Planet Earth.”

I have to rewatch to see if there was a futuristic RV in either or both. It’s been decades since I’ve seen them. In fact, I think the only time I’ve ever seen Planet Earth in its entirety was in a screening at a Star Trek convention sometime in the mid-1970s, when I was about 13 or 14. Everything about the experience weirded me out. Not only had Gene Roddenberry made something other than Star Trek (somehow it hadn’t occurred to me that that was possible), but he’d made this thing about a bleak future where women oppressed men by keeping them drugged, which, I suppose, in hindsight, was meant to be some kind of feminist statement made via relatable role reversal, but to me back then just seemed ultra-creepy and misogynistic. At least, that’s my recollection some 40 years later. (Seems like my memory is pretty good. From Wikipedia: “The pilot focused on gender relations from an early 1970s perspective. Dylan Hunt, confronted with a post-apocalyptic matriarchal society, muses, ‘Women's lib? Or women's lib gone mad?’”) Be that as it may, it was pure Roddenberry, moralizing on a contemporary issue in the context of a futuristic sci fi setting.

Anyhow, it certainly seems likely that Roddenberry’s two pilots inspired the kid-friendly, dumbed-down, talking-chimp-inclusive, morality-play-of-the-week Ark II. After all, it’s not like post-apocalyptic sci fi was common on TV. And the dates line up: Genesis II was 1973, Planet Earth was 1974, and Ark II was 1976. The similarities in the heavy-handed biblical titles between Genesis II and Ark II are surely not coincidental, either. And of course, the influence of Star Trek itself is apparent, in everything from the costume design to the cast diversity (a white man, an Asian woman, a Latino teen, and, of course, a chimp) to the thinly veiled social commentary. To seal the deal, Filmation, which produced Ark II, also produced Star Trek: The Animated Series (1973-1974).

Which brings me back to where I started: the announcement of a new Star Trek animated series, to be produced by CBS’ Eye Animation Productions, Secret Hideout, and of course -- Roddenberry Entertainment.

So what's it going to be like? Here’s a description from Indiewire: “The series will feature CG animation and follow the adventures of a group of lawless teens who discover a derelict Starfleet ship. Faced with such temptation, these young rebels will use the ship and along the way, learn life lessons and search for meaning and salvation.”

So basically, Ark II with a spaceship instead of a futuristic RV? (Cue music: “It's the circle of life,
And it moves us all…”)

And...hang on...didn't Discovery just get thrown into the distant future? Will there be some Federation-style civilization rebuilding? Hmm...

See, I told you I’d connect the dots.

Compare the opening of Planet Earth:

to the very similar opening of Ark II:

both cousins to the traditional Star Trek opening we know so well (here from TAS), about finding new civilizations rather than rebuilding an old one: